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Two unavoidable processes punctuate our century: The unprecedentedurbanisation of our planet (United Nations, 2014) and the spread of ubiquitouscomputing (Weiser, 1991) and urban data streams. This process of urbanisationcorresponds with the process of digitalisation of urban life: whileurbanisation acts on a physical infrastructural level, the digital develops asa kind of metastructure above the infrastructure. This metastructural leveloffers a flexible framework through which information is continuously andoperatively being symbolized. Today, Information technology and theavailability of abundant urban data streams could be considered as forerunnersof our time, having unprecedented impacts comparable to the ones brought by thesteam engine at the dawn of industrialisation and the electrification ofcities. It is therefore no longer conceivable to think of the physicalstructure of the city without including its digital counterpart. Against thisbackground, we will explore the role of computational power and informationtechnologies as dominant factors in the formation of computational urban modelsand normative city theories. We will show how these models and theories,emerging mainly during the 19th and 20th centuries, present leapingcorrespondences with more ancient conceptions of the city, when observed from ameta-level or episteme (Foucault, 2002) approach. First, and for the sake ofclarity, we will deal with some methodological elucidations around the conceptsof theory, model and episteme, and how we will refer conceptually to theseterms throughout this paper. Secondly, we will review these evolvingtechnological and computational levels of abstraction and their influence onthe different conceptions of the city. Thirdly, we will develop the hypothesisof a conceptual gap, between our current technological capacity -- grounded onthe abundance and availability of urban data streams -- and the state of theart in urban modelling and city theory. Lastly, building upon Foucault'sconcept of episteme (Foucault, 1970) and genealogy (Foucault, 1977b), we willexplore this gap by speculating around the possibility of an inversion incomputational urban modelling and city theory. And above all, we will questionthe terms in which we can think of the city, in an age where the world can bevirtually conceived as fully urban, and the continuity and abundance of urbandata streams giving account of it can be taken for granted. How are wearticulating the phenomena we call city on top of this generic common ground?

Inverting normative city theories and computational urban models: Towards a coexistence with urban data streams